Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument

by Mike Parker Pearson

  Despite the shortcomings of our knowledge about Stonehenge, however, we know a lot about the people who lived in Britain at the time that it was built. They were farmers who lived off crops (such as wheat and barley) and domestic animals (pigs, cows, and sheep) as well as gathering and hunting wild foods. They used clay pots for cooking and storing their food, but they roasted meat as well as boiling it. Their diet may have been predominantly vegetarian and dairy-based, interspersed with special occasions when animals were slaughtered and eaten. Judging by finds from elsewhere in Europe, their clothing was made of leather, fur, and vegetable fibers, such as flax (used to make linen).14 The Neolithic people of Britain reared sheep but we have no evidence that they had yet invented spinning or weaving of wool. Nor is there any evidence that they had invented the wheel. Horses, too, may well have been unknown; although horses were being used for riding in eastern Europe and the steppes of central Asia, it seems that they had not yet been brought across the Channel.

  Stonehenge was built at the end of the Stone Age, so most of the people’s tools were made of flint—arrowheads, scrapers for cleaning hides, strike-a-lights for making fire, and a tool set of other specialized awls, burins, knives, and saws. Their axes were made of flint or of igneous rock, polished and then hafted on to remarkably modern-looking ax handles. By 2500 BC, though, the first metal tools (copper axes) were beginning to appear in northwest Europe. Some may have been brought to Britain and Ireland or even made here; there are stray finds of early types of copper ax, but these cannot be closely dated. It also seems likely that the earliest copper tools would have been too valuable to put into the ground for archaeologists to find—and they had the advantage over flint axes in being recyclable. We have fewer remains of perishable organic equipment but we do know that people used birch-bark containers, cord made from sinews, rope made from linden bast (fibers) or from honeysuckle, wicker baskets and leather bags, arrow quivers and belt pouches.

  Neolithic people seem not to have lived in villages, except in a few special areas, such as the islands of Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland. Across most of Britain, their dwellings were single farmsteads or hamlets. Before about 3000 BC, a typical farm might have consisted of a rectangular house, normally around 12 meters long and 5 meters wide. Some rectangular houses were rather larger and can be called “halls” but no one knows if these were domestic dwellings or community buildings. After 3000 BC, house forms adopted a square plan of about 5 meters across. Remains of Neolithic houses are difficult to find because they were usually made of wood and the shallow holes in which their posts were set have only rarely survived later plowing. Nonetheless, archaeologists are fairly certain that the limited spreads of worked flints found in plowed fields derive from hamlet-sized settlements.

  This apparently isolated pattern of living contrasts with what we know of Neolithic gathering places, where people assembled periodically in large numbers. During the fourth millennium BC, the building of large, communal tombs required the collective efforts of many families coming together. Even larger numbers congregated at causewayed enclosures, a type of gathering place that was especially popular in the thirty-seventh century BC. Later on, after 3600 BC, the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain built other large monuments that required many hands, a labor force no doubt drawn from farmsteads scattered over wide areas. Archaeologists often talk of mobility among these populations—meaning that they moved seasonally from place to place with their animals rather than living all year round in one spot. The early farmers of Britain appear to have been more similar in these terms to their hunter-gatherer ancestors than to the early farmers of mainland Europe—who were much more sedentary, living in large longhouses and occupying the same plot of land for centuries.

  Reconstruction of a Neolithic house of the fourth millennium BCE.

  The periodic gatherings were moments when Neolithic people encountered others from some distance away and at such occasions artifacts and no doubt animals were traded or exchanged. One of the most archaeologically visible trade items was the ax. Polished-stone axes from the distinctive igneous rocks of Cornwall, Wales, and the Lake District ended up hundreds of miles from their quarries, no doubt passed from hand to hand many times. Even pottery was traded. Distinctive pots made from clays found only on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall made their way to the chalklands of central-southern England, perhaps brought along the coast in boats. So the little settlements of Neolithic Britain were not entirely self-sufficient and self-reliant communities: They were tied in to long-distance networks of kin groups and exchange partners across Britain, traveling by land along forest paths, by water in small boats, and meeting up at seasonal gatherings.

  Their crops and domesticated animals were part of a “farming package.”15 The whole package originated about ten thousand years ago in the area that is now Syria, Iraq, and southern Turkey. Much ink has been spilled by archaeologists discussing whether the first farmers then migrated out of the Near East, taking their domesticates with them, or whether the crops and animals merely passed slowly down the line westward, traded onward to neighbors who still lived from hunting and gathering. Whichever, the British did not invent farming for themselves—it all comes from the “cradle of civilization” in the Middle East.

  Britain’s early farmers also exploited the forests around them. There were edible roots and tubers, stems, shoots, and greens, as well as seeds, nuts, and fruits. The burned remains of hazelnuts, crab apples, hawthorn fruits, and blackberries are regularly found in Neolithic pits. Britain was also home to wolves, bears, wild boar, and a now extinct species of wild cattle, the aurochs (Bos primigenius). This hefty beast, standing 1.8 meters high, was found throughout Europe, and survived in Britain until at least the Bronze Age. It finally went extinct when the last one died in Poland in 1627. Analysis of the DNA of these massive animals shows that aurochsen were not interbred with domestic cattle, which arrived in Britain around 4000 BC, and whose ancestry lies in the Middle East. Recent work on the DNA of Neolithic pigs also shows that, although there could have been interbreeding with European and British wild boar, these too were offspring of animals with similarly Middle Eastern origins.16

  What happened during the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic—that is, the arrival of agriculture from its place of origin in the Middle East, and the change from a mobile to a settled way of life—is one of the big debates in archaeology.17 Even today, there is fundamental disagreement as to whether the indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Britain took up farming by getting hold of the “package” through cross-Channel trading with farmers on the Continent, or whether domesticates were introduced by Neolithic colonizers who brought animals and crops to Britain in their small boats, perhaps wiping out the indigenous peoples in the process.

  Studies of modern and ancient DNA can give us some idea of who Britain’s earliest farmers were, and thus reveal something of the ancestry of the people who built Stonehenge. Modern DNA can be used to speculate on the likely periods when new genetic material was introduced into resident populations.18 It seems that most people in northern Europe today derive the majority of their genes from a time long before farming—the period known as the Upper Paleolithic, when hunters first moved back into northern Europe and Britain, around 14,700 years ago, as the northern ice sheets of the last ice age began to retreat. A small proportion of our genes are likely to have originated from southwest-Asian populations at some point in prehistory, but it is not clear when. While some scholars have considered these genes to be the relict traces of the earliest farmers, others link their introduction into the European gene pool to migrations westward from the Near East much later on, in the Bronze Age.

  Recent studies of ancient DNA from skeletons of central Europe’s earliest farmers (7,500–7,000 years ago) have shown that only a few of these people had ancestors from the Middle East.19 Most of them were descendants of the hunter-gatherers whose ancestors had settled in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic. Th
ere is growing scientific evidence that Europe’s earliest farming communities were melting pots of genetic and cultural diversity in which local hunter-gatherers took up the farming way of life.

  Analysis of the ancient DNA of hunter-gatherers and early farmers in Britain is still in its infancy, but studies of modern DNA have hinted at the probability that, while most of today’s population is derived from hunter-gatherer ancestors already in northern Europe, there are also genes resulting from a large-scale movement of people along the Atlantic seaboard from Spain and Portugal—a movement that could well correlate with the arrival of farming in Britain.20 The hunter-gatherer ancestors were not necessarily long-term residents in Britain; they could also include former hunter-gatherers in France who had converted to farming and then crossed the English Channel to settle—their genetic signatures, as surviving in modern DNA, would be indistinguishable from indigenous hunter-gatherers within Britain. Whatever the case, the earliest farmers in Britain were most probably ethnically diverse, originating in different parts of Europe’s Atlantic zone.

  It is unclear just what happened when farming eventually reached the Atlantic edge, having spread across the whole of Europe. In the Netherlands and southern Scandinavia, local communities initially carried on hunting and gathering, and adopted only some of the trappings of farming. In northern France, it seems, agriculture was a far more attractive proposition. Almost certainly, farming required more work: Studies have shown that hunting and gathering are less time-consuming than agriculture, leading social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins to call prehistoric hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society.”21 As well as possessing domesticated plants and animals, farmers along Europe’s Atlantic coast used fired-clay pots, polished-stone axes, and arrows tipped with leaf-shaped flint points; from 4000 BC onward, people were using these distinctive items right across Britain and Ireland.

  Alison Sheridan, head of Early Prehistory at the National Museums of Scotland, has identified groups of Early Neolithic pottery in Ireland, western Scotland, and England that she thinks are comparable with styles used by farming communities in northern France and Brittany.22 Perhaps these were traditions of pottery-making brought by settler farmers who not only made the short hop across the English Channel but also sailed right up the west coast of Britain in search of suitable land to colonize.

  The earliest stone monuments in Britain are called closed chamber tombs and simple passage tombs; these were built in stone and appear to derive from styles of tomb building employed in the Morbihan region of Brittany in France, where such tombs date to between 4300 and 4000 BC.23 Examples at Carreg Samson in west Wales and Achnacreebeag in Scotland are thought to have been erected soon after the arrival of farming in Britain, shortly before 4000 BC. While these early megalithic tombs may document the arrival of farming in western Britain and Ireland, there are signs that farming might have arrived in eastern Britain via a different and shorter route—the 22 miles across the English Channel from Calais to Dover. At Coldrum in Kent there is a megalithic tomb built out of sarsen, coincidentally the same type of rock used to construct the great stone circle at Stonehenge; bones of the people buried within the Coldrum tomb have been dated to shortly after 4000 BC.

  There is another tantalizing clue about cross-Channel links in the earliest days of farming. One of the most precious tools widely distributed across western Europe at that time was a type of stone ax made out of polished jadeitite.e This shiny green rock was quarried high up in the Alps. An international team of archaeologists has not only established exactly where these quarries were but has also worked out when the axes were made.24 Those that reached Britain were made after 6000 BC but before 4000 BC, so they must have entered circulation before farming came to Britain. Whereas other types of stone axes were used as tools, it seems that these beautiful and delicate objects had more than just a practical purpose. Alison Sheridan thinks that they were brought across the Channel as already ancient heirlooms by farming colonists. But others have a different explanation. Julian Thomas reckons that these jadeitite axes crossed the Channel soon after they were made, as long-distance exchanges between British hunter-gatherers and Continental farmers; perhaps they accompanied some of the first transactions by which the inhabitants of Britain began to obtain cattle and cereal crops.

  The answer to this conundrum should lie in where these extraordinary axes have been found in Britain. If they are found in the campsites of hunter-gatherers, then they were brought across the Channel very early and Julian may be right; if they turn up in Neolithic contexts, then Alison is probably correct. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the forty or so jadeitite axes found in Britain are stray finds and come from uncertain contexts. The most secure find-spot is for an ax found in the Somerset Levels in southwest England, next to a Neolithic trackway known as the Sweet Track, not far from the mid-third millennium BC trackway where a crudely carved wooden figurine (“god-dolly”) was found.25 Prehistoric wooden trackways across swamps and marshes are wonderful archaeological remains because organic materials sometimes survive remarkably well in bogs as a result of remaining perpetually waterlogged. We can also date the tree rings of the timbers felled to make the Somerset trackway—a dating method known as dendrochronology. From this, we know that the Sweet Track was built in the winter of 3807 or spring of 3806 BC, so the jadeitite ax was clearly deposited by early farmers, not by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Another such ax was found at Durrington, an area where there are traces of Early Neolithic farmers as well as previous hunter-gatherers. The evidence is unsatisfactory, but I suspect that most jadeitite axes didn’t reach Britain until 4000 BC, so they were already old, if not antique, objects when they were brought here.

  A pair of Neolithic stone axes from the quarries at Langdale in the Lake District. These polished axes are nearly a foot long. While some axes were used for practical purposes, others show no signs of wear so appear to have had a ritual or symbolic value.

  There are plenty of theories about the coming of agriculture to Britain, but very little evidence of how it affected the island’s indigenous population. A scenario of complete ethnic replacement of British hunter-gatherers by Continental farmers is not favored by archaeologists. In a few instances Neolithic sites sit on top of Mesolithic remains, suggesting some form of continuity. If the growing evidence from mainland Europe is anything to go by, then it seems most likely that the ancestors of the Stonehenge people were a mix of indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers, a small proportion of whom had roots as far east as southwest Asia. Yet the radiocarbon dates for Mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments fade away around 4500 BC, a good five hundred years before the first traces of farming in Britain. Could it be possible that the natives had virtually died out before farmers arrived from the Continent?

  Study of ancient DNA from the skeletons of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers would enable us to tell whether these were two genetically separate populations or whether the first farmers were the acculturated descendants of indigenous hunter-gatherers. Unfortunately, whatever the British Mesolithic funerary rites may have been, they have left very little trace for archaeologists to find. Although there are few skeletal remains to work with, an ancient DNA project is now underway to compare populations in Britain from before and after the advent of farming.

  In the Stonehenge area there are very few traces of the earliest farmers. Hunter-gatherer groups definitely used the Avon valley for their campsites up to the fifth millennium BC: Their presence is recognizable from distinctive, long flint blades, and tiny stone tools known as microliths. One of these Mesolithic campsites was at West Amesbury, where a stone circle was built more than a thousand years later.

  Bizarrely, the oldest suspected cow bone from Britain—and potentially the earliest evidence for farming in Britain—comes from Stonehenge itself. When scientists radiocarbon-dated a long bone of a cow-sized animal from the packing deposit of one of the stones in the sarsen circle at Stonehenge, they were
amazed to discover that it dated to within the period 4360–3990 BC.26 f Given that the sarsen circle was not actually erected until some fifteen hundred years later, this bone is clearly problematic. It could have been an “antique” brought to Stonehenge when the sarsens were put, up, but it is more likely that it had become buried below the grass on this spot before 4000 BC and then ended up incorporated into the hole dug for the sarsen. Until future research can confirm that this anomalous bone really is from a domesticated cow as opposed to an aurochs or a large red deer, it remains a tantalizing find. Even if this bone had been lying around for hundreds of years before it eventually ended up in a sarsen stonehole, the possible presence of a cow in the area at such an early date raises the prospect of people having visited this particular spot when farming first came to Britain.

  Map of Avebury, Stonehenge, and Preseli, with other henge complexes and related Neolithic sites.

  We know that, later on, some early farmers had a party near Stonehenge. On a hill to the east, high above the Avon valley on the chalk ridge of Coneybury, a group of people congregated around 3800 BC to bury the remains of a feast in a large circular pit.27 They had eaten eight cattle, roe deer, red deer, pigs, and even beaver, having prepared and served the meat in more than twenty different pots, some of which were large enough to provide twenty servings each.

  As a student, my project colleague Colin Richards, of the University of Manchester, had worked on Julian Richards’s (no relation) excavation of this remarkable find at Coneybury and was intrigued by the blackness of the soil in which these bones and potshards lay. This was caused by the high organic content of the deposit, indicating that ash and food residues had been buried to decay here. The quantities of meat-bearing bones found at Coneybury show that this feast could have fed several hundred people. The freshness of the potshards when they went in the ground indicates that the pit must have been dug close to where the feast was held. Why did all these people gather here, at such an early date, to eat on this hilltop? From Coneybury they would have been able to look southeast toward the river and northwest toward the future site of Stonehenge, just half a mile away.